‘Hillbilly Obama’

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, June 17, 2026

 

Conventional wisdom has it that J.D. Vance has been set up to be the fall guy for our new devil’s bargain with Iran. I don’t buy it.

 

Although there’s evidence to support it, I admit.

 

The vice president, not his boss or the secretary of state, will be in Switzerland on Friday for meetings that will take the place of the signing ceremony, after the deal was formally signed ahead of schedule on Wednesday. He’ll be forced to smile awkwardly for the cameras and glad-hand conniving Khomeinists whom the White House hoped to depose as recently as four months ago. That photo op is a 2028 attack ad waiting to happen.

 

It’s also the vice president, not Donald Trump or Marco Rubio, who’s spent the week doing the rounds of national media to sell the deal to skeptical Americans. He’s selling a book too, I realize, which gives him a modest financial incentive to seek out airtime. But he surely understands that his visibility at this moment is making him the public face of a geopolitical s—t sandwich.

 

And as I conceded on Monday, it’s the vice president who’ll be scapegoated for the deal by Republican hawks in politics and media. Blaming Donald Trump for a policy failure is a poor career move for anyone whose professional success depends on the favor of a right-wing constituency. So politicians and pundits will tailor their criticism accordingly to hold Vance, not the alleged greatest dealmaker on the planet, responsible for this one.

 

Fox News contributor Ben Domenech derisively described the worldview behind the Iran deal as “Hillbilly Obama,” alluding to another work in the veep’s literary oeuvre. Vance will wear that all the way to the next election cycle. Going forward, hawks will treat his “America First” isolationism as nothing more than a MAGA-friendly veneer for feckless Democratic-style accommodationism toward enemy regimes. Among traditional conservatives, suspicions that he’s a weakling will be set in stone.

 

The events of the past 72 hours have all the trappings of making him a fall guy for the deal. Yet I still don’t buy it.

 

I don’t buy it because it seems probable to me that Vance wanted to become the White House’s chief public advocate for the deal. This wasn’t a case of him being tapped by Trump to do a thankless job and accepting dutifully but reluctantly, to prove he’s a good soldier. This was him seeking out an assignment and getting it, I suspect.

 

He’s gambling on the direction of the right post-Iran. “At some point, this Republican Party needs to decide which kind of foreign policy it’s gonna have,” Domenech told Fox. “Is it going to be an ‘America First’ foreign policy, one that is bold, that uses American power in key moments decisively in order to affect what it wants to achieve? Or are we going to just backslide into being some kind of ‘Hillbilly Obama’ kind of GOP?”

 

I think J.D. Vance would agree with all of that. The Republican Party does need to decide, and it will decide in 2028.

 

It will decide to be a “Hillbilly Obama” GOP, he’s wagering.

 

An unpopular war.

 

The Iran war put the vice president in a terrible position. Isolationists like Tucker Carlson clamored to have him on the ticket in 2024, believing he’d be a counterweight inside the White House to the war-hungry “blob” of interventionists that dominates Washington.

 

They got their wish—whereupon Trump turned around and attacked Iran not once but twice in his first 14 months in office. Vance had failed miserably at his core task of preventing another Middle East misadventure. The right’s Lindbergh faction, whom he’s counting on to turn out for him two years from now, was sorely disappointed.

 

The VP needed to atone to them, and now he has. He couldn’t stop the war from starting but he could, and did, spearhead the effort to end it before it escalated. Making himself a spokesman for the deal this week in national media is his way of showing the Tuckerites that he’s still one of them, still committed to curtailing foreign entanglements even if his boss isn’t.

 

That will help him in the next primary, particularly when you remember that he faces more danger from the GOP’s isolationist flank than from its hawkish majority. Vance has always been more careful not to offend the right’s postliberals than he has been not to offend Reaganites, and not just because he’s a postliberal himself. I think he assesses, correctly, that a postliberal challenger could do him more damage in 2028 than any traditional Republican could.

 

All the charisma and grassroots energy is on that side of the party. Ted Cruz isn’t going to successfully primary J.D. Vance by calling him an Obama-esque weakling for brokering a deal blessed by Donald Trump, but a passionate Lindberghian demagogue like Tucker Carlson could cause trouble by accusing the vice president—and his boss—of having sold out “America First” by waging a foolish war with Iran. By making himself the face of a peace deal, Vance is hedging against that.

 

He’s also aligning himself with the vast majority of general election voters. That’s normally a smart thing for a politician to do, no?

 

Support for the war in Nate Silver’s polling tracker stands at 37.9 percent as I write this. Never once since it began has it exceeded 40.5 percent in popularity. It doesn’t necessarily follow that because most Americans oppose the war they’ll be in favor of the terms Trump and Vance have negotiated for peace, but it’s noteworthy that Democrats like Sen. Chris Murphy who hate the deal are backing it nonetheless in the name of ending the conflict.

 

My guess is that public opinion will run that way too: The deal is bad, but the war—and the persistently high gas prices it’s caused—are worse. If the former ends up curing the latter, Vance will take credit for having restored something akin to the prewar status quo.

 

Bear in mind too that, by 2028, all factions of American voters are likely to have landed on the position that the conflict with Iran was a failure. Even the right will end up in broad agreement on the point, as I noted yesterday, with Republican hawks and doves split only with respect to whose fault that mistake is. The war failed because its aims were unrealistic from the jump, isolationists will say; the war failed because the president refused to “finish the job,” interventionists will counter.

 

There are worse fates politically than being known as the guy who wound down a conflict that literally everyone agrees fell short of its goals. That’s the fate J.D. Vance is trying to engineer for himself.

 

But there’s risk.

 

Suckers and fighters.

 

The vice president is making a wager with respect to the future of his own party.

 

The wager is that Republican disillusionment over Iran will lead the right to become more reluctant to flex America’s military muscle. “If even a pillar of national strength like Donald Trump couldn’t impose America’s will on the Iranians by force, no one can,” right-wingers might conclude. “Military interventions don’t work.”

 

J.D. Vance, man of peace, will be in a strong position if that’s how things shake out, especially if Democrats take interventionist stances in 2028 with respect to supporting NATO and Ukraine. A dovish nominee will look more attractive to the right if hawkishness in the next election appears more left-coded.

 

But there’s another scenario. The right might conclude that failing to “finish the job,” not undertaking the job in the first place, was the key problem with the Iran war. They’re primed to do so, frankly: Trump’s party has been conditioned to believe that all problems can be solved, and solved easily, through applications of sufficient ruthlessness. If America failed to bring the Iranians to heel—to “use American power in key moments decisively,” in Domenech’s words—its failure must have been a failure of will.

 

And which peace-loving figure around the president demonstrated the most conspicuous lack of will to engage Iran militarily?

 

Vance aspires to lead a party whose members divide the world into “suckers” and “fighters.” It is very risky for him to tout himself as reluctant to “fight” in the belief that the party will change so much in the aftermath of the war that it will come to see such reluctance as prudent, not weak.

 

And it will get riskier still if Iran’s behavior in the months ahead ends up making him look like a sucker.

 

The early signs don’t look good. NBC News reported yesterday that the Iranians launched drones at commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz after the agreement with the U.S. was signed. Sources tell Reuters that Iranian leaders fully intend to share the wealth their country will receive under the deal with Hezbollah. And news is circulating that federal law might force Trump to take the embarrassing step of delisting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization if he undertakes to lift sanctions.

 

Vance himself had been reduced to mumbling about “sensitivities” in the Muslim world to justify why the U.S. hadn’t officially released the text of the peace agreement until today. Other U.S. officials who spoke to CNN have taken to insisting that the text hardly matters at all. “What’s more important than the actual document is the understandings we have with each other,” one said, referring to the Iranians, “and that’s why it’s important to get it done, that we can create the environment to go and talk about all these things.”

 

Supposedly, per one source, Iranian officials have told the White House privately that they’ll satisfy Trump’s nuclear demands. Supposedly.

 

One regional expert summarized the White House’s grim predicament in an interview with the Wall Street Journal: “When it comes to nuclear negotiations, we are back at the prewar stage, but with the U.S. leverage [of a military attack] removed.” That’s not J.D. Vance’s fault, but the schmuckier this deal comes to appear to the average American, the schmuckier the administration’s most enthusiastic mouthpiece for it is destined to appear by extension.

 

Faith in Trump’s “toughness” and alleged negotiating savvy is such that most of the right won’t let itself be persuaded that a deal he supports is a sucker’s bargain. That will give Vance cover against naysayers as long as the boss continues to reassure Republican voters that it’s a great compromise, maybe the greatest compromise ever. But if our fickle president’s all-important image ends up battered by hawkish attacks, it’s possible that he’ll get cold feet and scrap it, leaving the VP hung out to dry. His feet might be getting cold already.

 

Republicans will nominate a dove for president—they already did, or thought they did, in the last three elections—but they won’t nominate someone whom they’re convinced is a sucker. The president disowning a deal that the VP is excited about would brand Vance a sucker to the right forever.

 

Crisis management.

 

Ending an unpopular war without looking like a pitiful rube in the process is the vice president’s challenge. What will he, or can he, do to manage his risk?

 

One thing he’s going to do is try to broker a durable, comprehensive peace with Iran.

 

Listen to any Vance interview this week and you’ll find him cooing over the possibility of rapprochement with the Iranians. On Monday, for instance, he told CNN that “the coolest thing about the progress we’ve made over the last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system—senior leadership, even IRGC officials—say, ‘You know what? We may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust. But we recognize the way that we’ve done business with the United States for 47 years is a mistake. Let’s try something else.’”

 

Yesterday he told Megyn Kelly that the president deputized him to do nothing less than “negotiate a deal that transforms the Middle East.” The linchpin of that transformation is the $300 billion under the deal that Iran will be able to access if it ends its nuclear program permanently. According to Reuters, the money consists entirely of private-sector funds, more than half of which have already been committed to “securing loans, establishing credit lines or directly financing the reconstruction of sites damaged in the war.” For the first time in decades, Iran might see meaningful foreign investment.

 

It’s the China playbook, in other words. The West is going to try to deradicalize a dangerous regime by wooing it with filthy corporate lucre and integrating it into the global economy. If it works, with Iran ultimately agreeing to more normal relations with the U.S. and its neighbors, Vance will say that the agreement signed this week ended up defanging the Khomeinist menace to a degree that no war ever did or could. (An Obama talking point from 2015, not coincidentally.) “Suckers” don’t normally score transformational diplomatic breakthroughs, do they?

 

If that really is the play, Vance and Trump will spend the rest of their term courting the Iranians in hopes of justifying this week’s deal retroactively as the first step toward a more meaningful peace. Which brings us to the second thing the veep will do to manage his political risk: As Jonathan Last notes, he’s all teed up to shift blame to Israel if the deal collapses.

 

The text was practically designed to make it easy to do so. The official text draft says nothing about restraining Iran’s use of terror proxies while declaring in its opening sentence “an immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon.” Iran demanded that Lebanon be included in the agreement because it wants Trump to use his leverage over Israel to prevent further Israeli attacks on Hezbollah. Israel opposed including Lebanon in the deal for the same reason. Iran won.

 

Because it did, Vance now has a ready scapegoat if the Iranians fail to meet their obligations under the agreement. It’s not that he and the president were schmucks for trusting the Khomeinists, and it’s not that the Khomeinists aren’t willing to be friends. It’s that Israel—which is destined to resume hostilities with Hezbollah and Iran at some point—selfishly refuses to absorb a few missile strikes now and then without retaliating as the White House goes about trying to secure lasting regional peace.

 

That spin has already begun, as you probably know. The hostility between Washington and Jerusalem is allegedly such that, as of yesterday, the White House had refused thus far to show the text of the deal to the Israelis, our allies in the conflict since day one.

 

And it’s unfortunately smart, cynical politics in America 2026, particularly for someone like the vice president who has his eye on the next election cycle. Vance’s Tuckerite postliberal base will love seeing him take up the cause of peace against Benjamin Netanyahu. So will Democrats and independents, as more members of each group now view Israel more negatively than positively. And so will plenty of Republicans between the ages of 18 and 49, of whom 57 percent now hold an unfavorable opinion of the Jewish state.

 

Vance wasn’t a rube for making a bad deal with the Iranians, you see. He was just saddled with the bad luck of having a renegade Israeli regime as his partner.

 

We should not underestimate the degree of difficulty involved in convincing the American right, a faction populated by millions of evangelical Christians, that Iran is a more trustworthy broker than Israel. But if the last 10 years have proved anything, it’s that right-wingers are willing to change their beliefs about all sorts of things to rationalize their allegiance to Donald Trump. J.D. Vance is betting that embracing Hillbilly Obama-ism toward a terrorist regime is one more belief that they’ll come around to. I wouldn’t bet against it.